At least 5 trillion US dollars of idle money is circulating in Asian countries, searching for good investment opportunities, observed a senior expert with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Kunming on Sunday.

The money abounds there and is waiting for you to grab," said Christophe S. Bellinger, a Senior Cofinancing Specialist with the ADB, at a Forum on Business Participation in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) cooperation, which opened in this capital city of southwest China's Yunnan Province, on Sunday.

"What the GMS countries need to do is to optimize the investment situation to woo the investors," said Bellinger.

Economic analysts say that in the coming five to ten years, the GMS countries will have an extremely high demand for money in their economic cooperation projects, with the spending on infrastructure construction alone estimated at some 15 billion US dollars. The ADB, or the main sponsor of the GMS program, however,could only supply a very small portion of it.

Statistics showed that in 2004, the ADB in all approved 80 loans and 12 equity investments, valued at 5.5 billion US dollars only, which is almost nothing as compared with the gargantuan need of the GMS countries.

Initiated in 1992 by the ADB, the GMS economic cooperation mechanism is now trying to attract more private investors to participate in the GMS projects through the creation of a mature and sound investment environment.

"As common practices all over the world, the GMS countries need to work more on transparency, financial reforms, predictabilities,rational tariffs and patent right protection," said Bellinger.

Held on the eve of the Second GMS Summit which is scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, the Sunday forum has attracted more than 300 entrepreneurs and many other ADB officials and government figures.

"The GMS has been a promising and burgeoning area, blessed with prosperity, entrepreneurship and vitality," commented Jin Liqun, vice-president of the ADB, on Sunday.

However, many experts hold that there remain quite a few negative factors in the subregion that could dampen the enthusiasm of potential investors, particularly the private ones.

John R. Cooney, the director of Infrastructure Division in the ADB, said that although the GMS countries desperately need closer cross-border linkages and better infrastructures, they need more badly the improvement of their "soft environments", such as better financial services, better governance and long-term respect to contracts.

"The GMS countries are all developing countries at different development stages, so the government should phase in more favorable policies to tease out private investors," said Cooney.

Pattana Sittisombat, president of the Commerce Chamber in Chiangrai, Thailand, said the most outstanding obstacles for free trade in the subregion are not geographical separation or poor logistics service, but certain regulations set forth by some governments.

"In some countries of the region, we still need to ask for special recommendations from officials to get the permissions, and many technical details such as the size of trucks and procedures became the gridlock for trade," said Sittisombat.

The GMS economic cooperation involves six member countries, namely China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. The upcoming Second GMS Summit is expected to push forward the subregional cooperation in many areas, with several memorandums to be signed on trade facilitation, infrastructure construction and the establishment of a joint immune system against animal diseases.

Source: Xinhua